Trump's statements about supporting Israel's war with Iran become more deranged as Trump takes ownership for the war. Plus: journalist Ken Klippenstein on Trump's next foreign policy moves. -------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
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| Transcription by CastingWords Good evening. | |
| It's Tuesday, June 17th. | |
| Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube tonight. | |
| Ever since the Israelis attacked Iran on Thursday night, many of Donald Trump's most passionate supporters have raised questions about the extent to which Trump knew or was involved in this new war. | |
| In one sense, that concern is understandable. | |
| Many of them believed Trump's repeated promises for years to keep the US out of new wars, especially new wars in the Middle East. | |
| And they did not want to believe that he had violated that promise so radically and so quickly, less than five months in office, by sanctioning and involving the United States in a new war with Iran. | |
| But those denials have grown increasingly implausible every day as Trump has now boasted of his involvement and repeatedly made clear the central role that he and the United States played in the planning, launching, and coordinating of this war. | |
| Whatever remaining doubts still lingered about whether Trump's role was as significant as he claimed were completely crushed by Trump himself today. | |
| As the president issued a series of tweets, one more unhinged and more drunk than the next, proclaiming that we... | |
| He also ordered the Iranians to accept the deal that he told them to sign and threaten them with serious devastation if they refuse. | |
| Trump continuously discussed war options such as whether or not he will accept the Iranians coming back to the table or whether he would continue his war if they refuse. | |
| All signs clearly point to Trump now involving the U.S. directly in this war, but at the It's really just a question of when and how much and not if. | |
| And that means that Donald Trump has not only started but now directly involved the U.S. military in a new Middle East war, one which, if his statements aren't being believed, is growing more dangerous by the minute. | |
| Then, the independent journalist Ken Kippenstein breaks many stories genuinely Breaking stories on his substack where he went after wisely deciding to quit The Intercept last year. | |
| He received many leaks from sources inside the intelligence community, not the official and authorized leaks. | |
| Those are for Barak Raviv at Axios. | |
| But he gets the unauthorized one from mid-level or even low-level employees of the U.S. government. | |
| Ken has a new story out tonight about war plans of Trump for Iran that were leaked to him regarding the Israelis and the Americans' design on Iran. | |
| He'll be with us tonight to discuss that, as well as a Friday of other issues concerning this brand new war, various happenings in Washington, and more. | |
| Before we get to all of that, a quick programming note. | |
| As independent journalists, we do rely on the support of our viewers and our members. | |
| To provide that, you can join our Locals community, which gives you access to a wide range of interactive features. | |
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| For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. | |
| you This is a unilateral Israeli attack. | |
| The United States is not involved. | |
| Now, there was a lot of skepticism, including from me, about whether that could possibly be true. | |
| It was unimaginable that the Israelis, given their full-scale dependence and reliance on the United States for military support, financial support, diplomatic support, would possibly launch a major war of this kind without not only advising Donald Trump in advance, but getting his approval. | |
| After all, Trump had been pretending to restrain the Israelis. | |
| He publicly was selling them as late as that day. | |
| That he doesn't want them to attack Iran because that would sabotage the diplomatic resolution that he still believed he could achieve. | |
| But it was inconceivable that the Israelis would just go and defy Trump and launch a war on their own. | |
| And increasingly, every day, it's become clearer and clearer through reporting, particularly through Donald Trump's own statements. | |
| That he not only knew about the war in advance, that he not only greenlit the war in advance, but that he ordered his administration to plan the war directly with Benjamin Netanyahu, and especially once he began to see that the war was perceived as a success, Trump began getting more and more explicit, more and more blatant about his view that the credit for this war goes first to him, that he's the one who's essentially the author of this war, the father of it, the person who's now presiding over it. | |
| And over the past 24 hours, Trump's posture has dramatically transformed in a way that I will confess I find genuinely alarming for reasons I'm about to show you. | |
| Donald Trump is not just talking any longer about America having participated in this war or supporting the Israeli effort. | |
| He's now talking about this war as though it is his, as though it is United States' war that we started for noble ends and that he intends to conclude. | |
| Through what he is now calling unconditional surrender. | |
| And he's no longer even pretending what they were trying to feign just a few days ago, which is that the Israelis launched this war unilaterally. | |
| Donald Trump is now saying this is our war. | |
| We're the ones who are dominating Iran. | |
| We're the ones who are beating Iran. | |
| And we won't even accept a ceasefire or negotiation of any kind. | |
| We want a complete end to this issue forever. | |
| And he I'm not sure exactly when. | |
| But he did so instead in a series of tweets or whatever they call postings on True Social that he later then posted on X. And we want to just show you several of them. | |
| This was late last night after we concluded our show. | |
| Yesterday evening, where he said, So that's pretty standard course for him just supporting the Israeli war based on this utterly unproven premise that Iran was seeking nuclear weapons, something we've been being told for 30 to 40 years, only for it to always become disproven. | |
| And Trump now has just asserted Even though his own direct national security, Tulsi Gabbard, told the Senate three months ago that it wasn't true, that Iran suddenly decided that it was going to seek a nuclear weapon and was very close to getting one, and that's why this word was justified. | |
| He was asked on Air Force One last night by CNN's Caitlin Collins about Tulsi Gabbard's statement to the Senate that the consensus of the intelligence community was that, in fact, Iran was not seeking. | |
| Nuclear weapons. | |
| They had a nuclear energy program, as they've had one for many years, but that the Ayatollah had not authorized nor decided that the Iranians should pursue a nuclear weapon, that their posture with regard to nuclear weapons hasn't changed at all. | |
| And she asked him, this is not some random person inside the intelligence community. | |
| This is not some person who isn't loyal to you. | |
| This is the person you fought. | |
| To get confirmed into this position by arguing that Tulsi Gabbard would clean up the intelligence community to make it reliable enough for you to depend upon when making decisions. | |
| She's the one that you picked. | |
| And she said the consensus of the intelligence community and the intelligence itself, which she's reviewed, is that Iran was not, in fact, pursuing nuclear weapons. | |
| And here's what he had to say when she asked him that. | |
| You don't believe Iran should be able to have a nuclear weapon. | |
| But how close do you personally think that they were to getting one? | |
| Because Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn't building a nuclear weapon. | |
| I don't hear what she said. | |
| I think they were very close to having one. | |
| It was a little low, so let's just play this over. | |
| So here's Caitlin Collins asking about Tulsi Gabbard's statement. | |
| So he says, I don't care what she said. | |
| That's kind of a humiliating statement to make about The director of national intelligence that you chose, I don't care what she says. | |
| The whole reason she's there is to provide you with the intelligence. | |
| But obviously Trump is deeply vested in the idea that this is a noble war that he helped launch, that he has now ordered U.S. military assets to fight in. | |
| There are already U.S. military assets active in that region, intercepting ballistic missiles sent from Iran, both in the skies and other ways. | |
| And they're certainly active in providing intelligence and in planning the war. | |
| And now we're getting closer and closer to the moment where Trump is making very clear that he's now going to start giving the Israelis everything that they demanded, as American presidents typically do in this case, meaning the B-2 bombers that are uniquely large enough to carry the bunker busters that are needed to destroy. | |
| Iran's premier enrichment facilities that are buried very deep underground. | |
| The Israelis can't do that on their own. | |
| And here was what Trump said this morning that I found to be the most significant, at least at that point, of his pronunciation. | |
| he said this, quote, "We now have complete and total control "of the skies over Iran." And obviously, to me at least, the key word there is we. | |
| We now have complete and total control over the skies over Now, unless Trump identifies as an Israeli or believes that Israel is a state in the United States, something that a lot of people do believe, they don't usually say that, but they do think that way, then we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran. | |
| It must mean that in Trump's mind, it's the United States military that's responsible for this war, that's fighting this war, that this is now an American war. | |
| We have complete and total control of the skies over Iran. | |
| He went on to say, So Israel is barely even mentioned in this framework any longer in Trump's mind. | |
| This is a war between the United States and Iran. | |
| He's giving credit to the Iranians for saying, you have a lot of good sky trackers and air defense systems. | |
| But we don't care because it's no match for our technology. | |
| He's not even mentioning Israel anymore. | |
| It's just absorbed into Donald Trump's mind that this is his war, the war that he planned, that he plotted. | |
| And to the extent that he perceives it to be a success, which he clearly does, he wants full credit for it, not even supporting a partial credit for it. | |
| Here's Trump issuing another tweet or whatever, another truth on Truth Social. | |
| He says, quote, We know exactly where the so-called supreme leader is hiding. | |
| He's an easy target, but is safe there. | |
| We're not going to take him out, kill, at least not for now. | |
| But we don't want missiles shot at civilians or American soldiers. | |
| Our patience is wearing thin. | |
| Thank you for your attention to this matter. | |
| So he's saying we know exactly where Iran's leader is, and we're going to let him live. | |
| And I feel like this kind of language, we're going to let you live, For now. | |
| We're not going to kill you for now. | |
| But if you shoot at any American asset, any American base in the region, which the Iranians have made quite clear they don't intend to do unless the United States attacks and bombs Iran directly. | |
| And obviously, if the United States attacks and bombs Iran directly, you have to expect that Iran is going to attack back just like they're doing with Israel. | |
| I keep hearing these American media people talking about these ballistic missiles sent from Iran is some sort of like aberrational, shockingly immoral, disproportionate response. | |
| Israel started the war. | |
| Unprovoked, they sent airplanes and missiles and bombs and had intelligence assets inside Iran shooting missiles and bombs, killing the military command, killing their families, killing whoever had the misfortune of living in those buildings, killing all sorts of civilians. | |
| Of course Iran is going to— Shoot back at Israel with whatever they have. | |
| Any country would. | |
| And the same is true for U.S. involvement in the war. | |
| If the United States directly starts bombing, Iran, as Donald Trump increasingly is hinting and suggesting that he intends to do, and all signs suggest is inevitable, of course, Iran is going to then shoot at American bases and American service members and other American interests in the region. | |
| And then Donald Trump is saying, if you do that, we're going to murder the leader of Iran. | |
| Which, if that's a war tactic, I guess it means you can bomb the White House, you can kill Netanyahu. | |
| Putin can kill Vladimir Zelensky by these standards. | |
| So this is Trump threatening Iran's leader directly, giving him orders, saying, we're going to let you live. | |
| That's why I say I think that there's a kind of power intoxication that has entered Trump's head. | |
| I don't mean to psychoanalyze him, but I've certainly never heard him speaking about war and destruction in these kinds of... | |
| You know, like he's saying, you're going to sign the deal that we told you to sign. | |
| And he's basically now saying he's not interested in negotiations any longer. | |
| He only wants unconditional surrender. | |
| It's like a power kind of dynamic that is driving Trump. | |
| Remember, this is somebody who ran on a platform of saying he wants his legacy to be a peacemaker. | |
| That one of the worst and dumbest things the United States has done, one of the most self-destructive, has pursued wars in the Middle East, especially regime change wars, which this is quickly becoming. | |
| And now here he is just being pulled every day more and more into it, and he seems to be taking a lot of pleasure in it and really enjoying this posture of, like, war leader. | |
| Perhaps of all the things that have been posted, and we're going to still show you some others, this might actually be the most disturbing. | |
| This wasn't written by Trump. | |
| This was written by Mike Huckabee, who is an end-times evangelical, someone who believes, and that's why Trump made him U.S. Ambassador to Israel, the first non-Jewish person to ever hold that position, that the United States has a biblical mandate to protect and support and strengthen Israel, that Israel has to be fully united and dominate and occupy and control all of the land under it, including the West Bank and Gaza. | |
| So that in Mike Huckabee's End Times Messianic religious view, that's when Jesus will come back and then consign everybody who's a non-believer, including all Jews, to hell unless they first repent and recognize Jesus as their savior. | |
| And that explains a lot of why there's so much support in the U.S. Congress for paying for Israel, for supporting Israel, for arming Israel. | |
| It's a religious belief. | |
| It's a theocratic belief that the Bible mandates that the U.S. government support Israel, strengthen Israel, protect Israel, even more so than it has to protect the United States because this is not a nationalistic mandate but a biblical one. | |
| And Mike Huckabee wrote Donald Trump a tax that Trump, when he received, obviously was very moved by, believes in, wants the world to see because Trump immediately, or I don't know if it was immediate, but quickly after went and posted it himself on Twitter. | |
| And I think the text of this email is very important. | |
| It's from Mike Huckabee, a pastor, politician, ambassador, and great person. | |
| That's what Trump introduced him as. | |
| And here's the text, quote, Mr. President, God spared you in Butler, Pennsylvania to be the most consequential president in a century, maybe ever. | |
| The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else. | |
| You have many voices speaking to you, sir, but there is only one voice that matters, his voice. | |
| I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you, but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts. | |
| No president in my lifetime has been in a position like yours, not since Truman in 1945. | |
| I don't think anyone's confused about what Mike Huckabee means there. | |
| What was Harry Truman's consequential decision of 1945? | |
| What shaped history? | |
| What made him so consequential? | |
| Obviously, it was ending World War II by dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan. | |
| One in Nagasaki, one in Hiroshima. | |
| And that's obviously what Mike Huckabee is suggesting God wants Trump to do, or at least something very similar to it in this case. | |
| He goes on, quote, I don't reach out to persuade you, only to encourage you. | |
| I believe you will hear from heaven, and that voice is far more important than mine or anyone else's. | |
| You sent me to Israel to be your eyes, ears, and voice, and to make sure our flag flies above our embassy. | |
| My job is to be the last one to leave. | |
| I will not abandon this post. | |
| Our flag will not come down. | |
| You did not seek this moment. | |
| The moment sought you. | |
| It is my honor to serve you, Mike Huckabee. | |
| Now, the tone of that text is really not... | |
| The typical tone of an ambassador to the president. | |
| It is basically someone who believes that they are required to assume a supremely humble position because they're talking to a person chosen by God to carry out an extremely important task. | |
| And that important task is to force Iran into complete and total surrender to no longer negotiate with them by using all force necessary to require them to do so. | |
| It's not a very Vague or difficult to discern text, its meaning is viscerally clear, immediately clear. | |
| And after receiving that email, Donald Trump began posting things like this that suggest that he, too, sees himself in this manner. | |
| Here's what he posted in the late morning or early afternoon in all capital letters, all uppercase letters, unconditional surrender, which, of course, that was the term used by Harry Truman and the British. | |
| For what they were dictating to the Germans, what they were dictating to Japan. | |
| And the idea of using two nuclear weapons in Japan, according to Harry Truman, was the best way, the fastest way, the most effective way to ensure that the Japanese would agree to unconditional surrender, which is what they agreed to after those nuclear bombs were dropped. | |
| And history debates whether they were going to anyway, whether it was really necessary, but that was the history. | |
| That's clearly what Mike Huckabee is referencing. | |
| So we're clearly now in a position where we are dictating the terms of how this war ends. | |
| We're not even pretending any longer that this is Israel's war. | |
| Again, there's no mention by Trump as he talks about Netanyahu or what Israel wants. | |
| There's no pretense if they're in charge. | |
| This is Trump's war. | |
| And his posture, the way he's speaking, the way he's writing, everything suggests that he's very intoxicated by this role. | |
| Here he posted on True Social after that quote, I have not reached out to Iran for, quote, peace talks in any way, shape, or form, responding to a news report suggesting that he did. | |
| This is just more highly fabricated fake news. | |
| If they want to talk, meaning Iran, they know how to reach me. | |
| They should have taken the deal that was on the table. | |
| It would have saved a lot of lives. | |
| Now, again, the deal that was on the table was one that everybody knew in advance that Iran could never and would never accept. | |
| I think this is one of the points that has become most obscured deliberately, most obfuscated. | |
| Everybody always understood that Iran was going to have a program of enriching uranium and centrifuges because those are necessary to have a nuclear energy program. | |
| And the treaties and conventions that Israel signed give Iran and every other country the absolute sovereign right to have a nuclear energy program. | |
| Despite their commitment not to develop nuclear weapons. | |
| And the way that you do that is by ensuring that they're only enriching uranium up to a certain percentage, 3%, 4%, enough to enable them to have nuclear energy, but not go to 90%, which is where they could have breakout for nuclear weapons. | |
| And Steve Woodcoff began the negotiations publicly on Fox by saying that he was subject to a lot of attacks from this. | |
| For saying this was that in the negotiations, of course, we're going to be open to having Iran maintain centrifuges and Because the idea is they can have an energy program, but not a nuclear program. | |
| And at some point along the way, a nuclear weapons program, at some point along the way, that completely changed in Trump's mind to any attempt by Iran to demand the right of enrichment, something they've had forever, something they had in the Iran deal, something that international law accepts that they have the right to have. | |
| And that's why they could never give up the right to enrich the right to nuclear energy, because it's a sovereign right that every country has, including them. | |
| It would be a humiliation for them to give that up. | |
| On top of which, their view is we want to use nuclear energy to power our country so we can sell our oil to as much as possible, that we don't want to consume our oil, we want to sell it. | |
| And so when Trump says they should have taken the deal that I told them to take, he means a completely untenable deal for Iran, one that they could never and would have never accepted. | |
| And had that been clear from the start, that Trump would have gotten to the point set up for him by Netanyahu and Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham. | |
| That a deal means dismantling the nuclear program, no enrichment whatsoever. | |
| There would have been no point in negotiating. | |
| Everybody would have known ahead of time this is going to go nowhere. | |
| But Whitcoff said the opposite. | |
| Trump on Air Force One was also asked last night how he sees this war ending. | |
| In other words, is he willing to negotiate a ceasefire? | |
| Is he willing to go back to the negotiating table to try and get a deal with Iran? | |
| And I want you not only to pay attention to what he said in response to this question, but kind of the way he said it. | |
| The way you stood there and just spat out what you're about to hear. | |
| So they asked him, I don't know how well you could hear that, but the audio was clear. | |
| I think it was a little low. | |
| It's on an airplane and the like. | |
| But the reporter asked him, what is it that you're hoping Iran will do? | |
| Are you willing to sit down with them and negotiate a ceasefire? | |
| He said, not a ceasefire. | |
| I want an end, a permanent end. | |
| And he was very careful about specifying that he doesn't want some temporary solution that ends the killing. | |
| He wants Iran to give up. | |
| And that's what he then went on to say was, or just completely giving up. | |
| So we had two choices, sort of like a permanent end to this problem or a complete giving up, and then he went back to true social, and that's when he started demanding, we accept nothing less than unconditional surrender. | |
| Now, last night we talked about the fact that there had been some prominent voices inside MAGA, inside the Republican Party, that had been for months urging Trump to avoid a war with Iran, not to get sucked in by Israel, to resolve this diplomatically. | |
| And one of those people has been Tucker Carlson, arguably the person who has done more to try and avert a war with Iran than any single other person. | |
| In fact, going back to 2020, when Trump killed or ordered assassinated Iran's top general, Salmane, Tucker Carlson was vehemently opposed to that, denounced it before it was done, argued against it before it was done, denounced it after. | |
| He thought it worked hard to have Jay-Z Vance picked as Trump's vice president because he And he's been arguing privately and publicly for a long time that Trump will destroy his presidency and the Mauga movement if he drags the United States into a new war. | |
| So unprovoked, because Tucker Carlson was with Steve Bannon yesterday. | |
| Tucker Carlson went on Steve Bannon's podcast. | |
| Steve Bannon then went on Tucker's where they talked about the... | |
| And it was still done from the perspective of not having been done yet. | |
| They weren't really criticizing Trump. | |
| They were kind of trying to urge Trump not to let Netanyahu suck him into this war. | |
| And Tucker Carlson was doing it from a place of praise for Trump, saying, I've known Trump for a long time. | |
| I really believe he views war as a horrific human event, that he has a genuine desire to avoid it. | |
| When he talks about peace, it's very genuine. | |
| They both agreed on that. | |
| And then Tucker Carlson was saying, if you let the neocons and the Israelis permit you to have the United States be dragged into the war, they've always wanted the U.S. to fight for Israel, you're going to destroy your presidency. | |
| You're going to split the MAGA movement. | |
| And he was doing it from this place of like, I want to be a voice that encourages you to think about what's good for the country. | |
| And knowing that I'm appealing to what I truly believe is your good side. | |
| And this is what Trump had to say in response. | |
| He posted this. | |
| Trump did very shortly after we finished our program. | |
| Last night, as soon as we were done, one of my colleagues alerted me to it. | |
| This is what he posted. | |
| Quote, Now you note here, everything Trump is saying, this is the part that I find most dangerous, this is the part that I believe is Trump actually believing what he's saying, is that he has reduced it in his mind to a very simplistic formulation. | |
| One that he keeps repeating is simple, which is either Iran gets a nuclear weapon, or you go to war and prevent them from having one. | |
| And since Iran having a nuclear weapon is unacceptable, only a war to prevent them from having one, or an agreement where they agree to give up their entire nuclear program, including energy, I keep saying it's very simple, they can't have a nuclear weapon. | |
| But the question of whether Iran was actually trying to get a nuclear weapon, whether they were negotiating to allow whatever safeguards were necessary to ensure that they didn't, that has all been swept to the side. | |
| It's now taken as a given in Trump's mind and therefore in the mind of a lot of his supporters, in the mind of a lot of the media narrative as well, that Iran was trying to get a nuclear weapon, and so the only way to debate this war is, are you in favor of allowing Iran to get a nuclear weapon, or do you want to go to war with them and destroy the country? | |
| And that's all there is in Trump's mind, are those two questions. | |
| But attacking Tucker Carlson that way, unprovoked, I think is an attempt by Trump to signal to podcasters or activists or MAGA influencers or Republican politicians. | |
| That no dissent is permitted, especially when it comes to something very important to Trump, which suddenly clearly has become destroying Iran or regime change in Iran or the war in Iran. | |
| And then anybody who speaks up and challenges Trump or questions Trump, he will expel them from the MAGA world, from Trump world. | |
| He'll revoke their MAGA card. | |
| And a lot of influencers and pundits and the like are seeing that, people whose careers and profit depends upon. | |
| Access to the White House, access to Trump. | |
| He purposely chose the most popular and influential one Trump did, Doug Carlson, to say, look, if I can do this Doug Carlson for even mild questioning of my war, any of you will just be instantly banished from the kingdom. | |
| It's just punishment for dissent is what that obviously is. | |
| Now, J.D. Vance, knowing that that's not a very substantive or sophisticated case that Trump is making, went to Twitter today to try and defend Trump. | |
| No hesitation at all, no questioning at all about whether this is the right war. | |
| Suddenly J.D. Vance is a voluntarily public advocate and cheerleader for this war, this unprovoked war that Israel is fighting against its enemy and now dragging the United States into. | |
| And here's what he had to say on Twitter, quote, Look, I'm seeing this from the inside. | |
| I'm admittedly biased toward our president and my friend. | |
| But there's a lot of crazy stuff on social media, so I wanted to address some things directly on the Iran issue. | |
| First, the president has been amazingly consistent over 10 years that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. | |
| Over the last few months, he encouraged his foreign policy team to reach a deal with the Iranians to accomplish this goal. | |
| The president has made clear that Iran cannot have uranium enrichment. | |
| And he said repeatedly that this would happen one of two ways, the easy way or, quote, the other way. | |
| Now, the idea that... | |
| That's why so many people who are prominent followers of his and supporters of his are feeling very confused, because he led them to believe the exact opposite. | |
| There was no suggestion from Trump over the last 10 years that he's going to go to war with Israel against Iran if they don't reach a deal on the exact day that Trump sets us the deadline. | |
| And again, you see J.D. Vance there kind of just sliding over the fact of whether Iran was actually trying to get a nuclear weapon in the first place. | |
| Yes, Trump has always said Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. | |
| Everybody said that. | |
| Obama said that. | |
| Biden said that. | |
| Hillary Clinton says that. | |
| George Bush said that. | |
| Everyone has said that. | |
| But none of them ever went to war with Iran because they didn't believe Iran was seeking a nuclear weapon. | |
| That was the consensus of our intelligence agency that they were in. | |
| And then Obama created a framework that everybody agrees monitored the Iranians to make sure they weren't trying to obtain a nuclear weapon. | |
| And so here's J.D. Vance just trying to say he's been consistent on this for 10 years. | |
| And so this war with Iran that he's now assuming has his own somehow is what you should have expected based on everything that he said over the last decade. | |
| Does anyone actually believe that? | |
| Vance goes on, quote, second, I've seen a lot of confusion over the issue of, quote, civilian nuclear power and, quote, uranium enrichment. | |
| These are distinct issues. | |
| Right, the confusion is coming from Trump and from the U.S. government. | |
| Iran could have civilian nuclear power without enrichment, but Iran rejected that. | |
| Okay, this statement is false. | |
| You cannot have nuclear power, civilian nuclear power, without uranium enrichment. | |
| Uranium enrichment is a prerequisite to having civilian nuclear energy. | |
| What J.D. Vance means here is that Iran could have a nuclear program, but they wouldn't be enriching the uranium themselves. | |
| It would be enriched in Saudi Arabia or the UAE or in some other place in the region, and then it would be given to Iran when they needed it, so they weren't enriching the uranium themselves as a way to guarantee that it never went above a certain percent. | |
| And they would dismantle all their own facilities. | |
| Why would Iran ever agree to be dependent upon some other country to provide them with what they're entitled to have? | |
| They're going to be dependent on Saudi Arabia to give them enriched uranium in order to keep their nuclear energy plants going? | |
| They had a deal with the United States, with Obama, and three years later, President Trump withdrew from it and nullified it. | |
| Why would they trust the United States or some other country to enrich uranium for them? | |
| The deal was always supposed to be that they were going to have their own enriched uranium. | |
| But have safeguards in place to make sure they didn't get a nuclear weapon. | |
| And nothing should have changed in that regard. | |
| Other than the fact that Trump started speaking to a bunch of neocons, spending his days talking to Sean Hannity and Mark Levin and Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton and especially Benjamin Netanyahu, all the same liars who lied the U.S. into war repeatedly. | |
| And they were the ones who persuaded him that enrichment means Iran has a nuclear weapons program and that's something he said that they can't have. | |
| And since Iran at the negotiating table isn't willing to give that up, that means Iran Trump is no longer willing to do a deal, and that's what convinced Trump was inevitable. | |
| Vance goes on, quote, I've yet to see a single good argument for why Iran needed to enrich uranium while | |
| above the threshold for civilian use. | |
| I've yet to see a single good argument for why Iran was justified in violating its nonproliferation obligations. | |
| I've yet to see a single good pushback against the IA's findings. | |
| If you look at the IA report, by the way, it specifically says there's no evidence that Iran has reactivated the nuclear program, that it suspended in 2003, exactly what Tulsi Gabbard said. | |
| But the reason Iran was enriching uranium above the percentage originally required by The Iran deal is precisely because Trump withdrew from the Iran deal. | |
| But there was still no evidence that the entire war is now predicated on that they were seeking a nuclear weapon. | |
| Exactly like there was no evidence for what the Iraq war was predicated on, that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction. | |
| Vance goes on, quote, "Meanwhile, the president has shown remarkable restraint in keeping our military's focus on protecting our troops and protecting our citizens. | |
| He may decide he needs to take further action to end Iranian enrichment. | |
| That decision ultimately belongs to the president. | |
| And, of course, people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy." The decision does not belong to the president. | |
| If you read the Constitution, which I presume J.D. Vance has done, he graduated from Yale Law School, Article I reserves the war-making power not to the presidency, but to the Congress. | |
| He'd have to go to the Congress and get approval for that war. | |
| I know that's very quaint. | |
| I know presidents don't do that anymore, but that is actually how the republic was constructed. | |
| That decision to fight a war with Iran or attack Iran does not belong to the president. | |
| He goes on, but I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue. | |
| And having seen this up close and personal, I can assure you that he is only interested in using the American military to accomplish the American people's goals. | |
| Whatever he does, that is his focus. | |
| I found that exceptionally unpersuasive. | |
| You can decide for yourself how you feel about it. | |
| But again, J.D. Vance is acknowledging, and the reason he put out a statement is because Trump is very close to involving the United States militarily in this war. | |
| The New York Times had an article today about what changed within Trump. | |
| Trump suggested that it was the Iranians who had changed. | |
| He said, I don't know what they got into them. | |
| They were going to do a deal, and they shifted. | |
| And again, I think he's confused about this issue about enrichment, or maybe he's not confused and is lying on purpose. | |
| I don't really know. | |
| I think he's confused. | |
| I think someone convinced him that the Iranians demanding the right to enrich meant that they wanted nuclear weapons, and the only way to do a deal was for them to give up enrichment completely, which he heard or thought they were going to do and then found out they wouldn't. | |
| Here's a New York Times account on what changed. | |
| AND BASICALLY, LONG STORY SHORT, IS THAT THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY CONCLUDED THAT NETANYAHU WAS GOING TO ATTACK IRAN WHETHER TRUMP WANTED HIM TO OR NOT. | |
| AND THAT TRUMP'S ONLY CHOICE WAS TO CUT OFF ALL EACH OF ISRAEL OR SUFFOCATE THEM TO PREVENT THEM OR JUST ACQUIESCE TO NETANYAHU | |
| Quote, That could imperil the Iranian regime itself and that he was prepared to go it alone. | |
| It became increasingly apparent to Trump administration officials that they might not be able to stop Netanyahu this time, according to interviews with key players in the administration, deliberations over how to respond and others familiar with their thinking. | |
| At the same time, Mr. Trump was getting impatient with Iran over the slow pace of negotiations and beginning to conclude that the talks might go nowhere. | |
| At one end of the spectrum was sitting back and doing nothing and then deciding on next steps once it became clear how much Iran had been weakened by the attack. | |
| At the other end was joining Israel in the military assault, possibly to the point of forcing regime change in Iran. | |
| There's actually another option here that The New York Times doesn't acknowledge, which is that if Trump really were opposed to Netanyahu striking Iran, If he really heard that he was going to do it, whether Trump wanted him to or not, he could just cut off all military aid to Iran. | |
| Why would we give military aid to Iran? | |
| Weapons and cash and diplomatic protection? | |
| Why would we protect Israel with our military fleet? | |
| If we really believe that Israel was about to do something we didn't want them to do that was contrary to our interests, the only two choices are not just to sit back and let them do it or join in. | |
| The actual real choice that he should have done, if this story is true and I have a lot of doubts, It is taking action to stop Israel or at least threatening them to cut off all aid if they did so. | |
| The New York Times says, quote, Mr. Trump chose a middle course, offering Israel as yet undisclosed support from the U.S. intelligence community to carry out its attack and then turning up the pressure on Tehran to give immediate concessions of the negotiating table or face continued military onslaught. | |
| When Israel chose war, Mr. Trump cycled from skepticism about attaching himself too closely to Mr. Netanyahu. | |
| To inching toward joining him and dramatically escalating the conflict, even bucking the view that there is no immediate nuclear threat from Iran. | |
| The day after the Camp David meeting, Monday, June 9th, Mr. Trump got on the phone with Mr. Netanyahu. | |
| The Israeli leader was unequivocal. | |
| The mission was a go. | |
| Mr. Trump was impressed by the ingenuity of the Israeli military planning. | |
| He made no commitments, but after he got off the call, he told advisors, quote, I think we might have to help him. | |
| As the first night wore on, meaning the Israeli attack, and the Israelis landed a spectacular series of precision strikes against Iranian military leaders in strategic sites, Mr. Trump began to change his mind about his public posture. | |
| When he woke on Friday morning, his favorite TV channel, Fox News, was broadcasting wall-to-wall imagery of what it was portraying as Israel's military genius, and Mr. Trump could not resist claiming some credit for himself. | |
| In phone calls with reporters, Mr. Trump began hinting that he had played a bigger behind-the-scenes role in the war than people realized. | |
| Privately, he told some confidants that he was now leaning toward a more serious escalation. | |
| Go along with Israel's early request that the United States deliver powerful bunker-buster bombs to destroy Iran's nuclear facility at Fordov. | |
| I don't believe that Trump was put into a corner by Netanyahu that way and then Trump decided to take credit for Netanyahu's war. | |
| I believe that Trump was on board from this from the beginning. | |
| And if that's not true, that reflects even more pathetically on Trump, that he would just allow Israel to dictate the future of U.S. foreign policy by saying, we're going to do this whether you want it or not, and the only choice you have is to sit back and let us or join us and make it even bigger, destroy the Iranian regime, which it seems like Israel and the U.S. are now well on their way to doing. | |
| Here from Axios today, just a little signal, a disturbing one, about Trump's seriousness now about this war. | |
| Trump team discusses potential Iran strike in a crucial situation room meeting. | |
| Three U.S. officials said Trump was seriously considering joining the war and launching a U.S. strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, especially its underground uranium enrichment facility in Fordow. | |
| Two Israeli officials told Axios that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli defense establishment continue to believe that Trump is likely to enter the war in the coming days to bomb Iran's underground enrichment facility. | |
| Here from CNN. | |
| They say that Israel says that Iran was racing toward a nuclear weapon, but U.S. intel says that it was years away. | |
| And that's when you heard Trump say, I don't care what Tulsi Gabbard says, or the U.S. intelligence community, that Iran's not developing a nuclear weapon. | |
| That's what U.S. intel says. | |
| but Netanyahu and his friends like Mark Levin and Sean Hannity told me that Israel is like seconds away from getting it. | |
| Quote, "When Israel launched its series of strikes against Iran last week, it also issued a number of dire warnings about the country's nuclear program, suggesting Iran was fast approaching a point of no return nuclear weapons and that the strikes were necessary to preempt their outcome. | |
| But U.S. intelligence assessments had reached a different conclusion, not only It was also up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one to a target of its choosing, according to four people familiar with the assessment. | |
| How they got so many people to just instantly overnight believe that Iran was just on the verge of getting nuclear weapons, they were actively seeking nuclear weapons, even though Netanyahu and the same people said that about Saddam Hussein and it was proven untrue, even though they've been saying it about Iran. | |
| For 40 years and it's proven untrue is genuinely mystifying to me. | |
| Here is the testimony of Tulsi Gabbard that I think we should always play when talking about this. | |
| This will start at the end of March. | |
| Asked whether or not the intelligence community believes Iran is now pursuing nuclear weapons. | |
| The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003. | |
| The IC continues to monitor closely if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program. | |
| All right, so let me just, we have Ken Clippen sign on who I want to talk to in just a second. | |
| So I actually want to go to the 2016 presidential debate, the Republican primary, where Donald Trump had an exchange with Jeb Bush about what U.S. foreign policy ought to be and how wrong it has gone. | |
| And here was the exchange between Jeb Bush and Donald Trump. | |
| They lied. | |
| They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none, and they knew there were none. | |
| There were no weapons of mass destruction. | |
| Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right? | |
| Now, you can take it any way you want. | |
| And it took Jeb Bush, if you remember, at the beginning of his announcement, when he announced for president, it took him five days. | |
| He went back. | |
| It was a mistake. | |
| It wasn't a mistake. | |
| It took him five days before his people told him what to say. | |
| And he ultimately said it was a mistake. | |
| The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives. | |
| We don't even have it. | |
| Iran is taking over Iraq with the second largest oil reserves in the world. | |
| Obviously, it was a mistake. | |
| George Bush made a mistake. | |
| We can make mistakes. | |
| But that one was a beauty. | |
| We should have never been in Iraq. | |
| We have destabilized the Middle East. | |
| So you still think he should be impeached? | |
| I think it's my turn, isn't it? | |
| You do whatever you want. | |
| You call it whatever you want. | |
| I want to tell you. | |
| They lied. | |
| They said there were weapons of mass destruction. | |
| There were none. | |
| And they knew there were none. | |
| There were no weapons of mass. | |
| OK. | |
| All right. | |
| The people Trump was talking about there, he They entered a war that destroyed the stability in the region. | |
| They made a joke. | |
| Those are the same people that Trump is now listening to. | |
| These are the people who have guided Trump to go and say exactly what George Bush and his supporters were saying back in 2002, 2003. | |
| Despite the intelligence community back then telling Bush and Cheney, parts of it were that there was no evidence of Saddam Hussein and mass destruction. | |
| That's when Dick Cheney set up his own intelligence unit. | |
| That they called the stovepipe, where he would work specifically with his people inside the intelligence community to give him the intelligence that he wanted. | |
| He would leak it to the New York Times. | |
| They would publish it on the front page. | |
| Tim Russert would ask about it on Meet the Press. | |
| That's how that war was manufactured and sold. | |
| It is exactly what Trump is doing. | |
| He's listening to not people like that, those exact people. | |
| And he's now saying the exact thing with the exact tactics, with the exact same motives that he was so viciously critical of. | |
| The Bushes and the Republicans were doing in 2002 and 2003 when he ran president in 2016. | |
| All right, last thing we want to show you. | |
| We've obviously shown you many times before various montages of all the different times over the last 30 years. | |
| Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel warned the world that Iran was minutes away or months away or weeks away from getting a nuclear weapon. | |
| Here's a montage produced by The Daily Show. | |
| Last night, just to underscore the point a little bit more, just how long Netanyahu has been saying this and just how gullible somebody has to be to wake up and say, you know what, this time I'm going to believe them. | |
| I'm going to choose to believe them now that the bombs are falling. | |
| Here's Netanyahu cycling through the years. | |
| Here first is what he said the day that Israel attacked Iran. | |
| If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time. | |
| It could be a year, it could be within a few months. | |
| All right, here he is in 2018 talking to CNN's Chris Cuomo. | |
| They have the wherewithal, the stored up preserved knowledge to make a bomb very quickly if they wanted to do it. | |
| And by the way, that was in response to a report from the IAEA that there's been no evidence since 2009. | |
| That Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapon. | |
| Here's Netanyahu at the U.N. in 2015. | |
| Iran is so dangerous. | |
| Weeks away from having the fissile material for an entire arsenal of nuclear bombs. | |
| Here he is in 2012. | |
| Actually, speaking to IB Times News, it's 2012. | |
| Very close. | |
| six months away from being about 90% of having the rich uranium for an atom bomb. | |
| Iran is... | |
| All right, actually, that was Meet the Press in 2012. | |
| Here he is in 2006. | |
| Iran is gearing up to have, to produce 25 bombs, atomic bombs a year, This is 1995 here. | |
| By the way, that was 1995, which is 30 years ago, when Netanyahu was Prime Minister of Israel still. | |
| If we look at any other country where a person like this runs a country for decades like this, we say, oh, that's an autocratic country, that's a dictatorial country, why does that person stay in power? | |
| That's pretty much how long Netanyahu has run Israel. | |
| There have been interims where he wasn't the Prime Minister, but over the last 20 years, essentially, it's been a one-person show. | |
| He's repeatedly lied to Americans, he's repeatedly lied to the public, he's repeatedly lied to the media. | |
| About exactly this issue, about Iran being on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon, and Trump now is ready to take the country to war, completely contrary to everything he's run on three straight times that he attacked Jeb Bush for doing, taking the country to war against the assessment of his own intelligence community based on imagined threats in his head that he's conjured up, and now he's on a power trip. | |
| Where he basically wants to prove that he can force Iran into unconditional surrender and increasingly seems inebriated with his power to do so by unleashing the entire mass force of the U.S. military on Iran until they eventually give in. | |
| That is an extremely dangerous war headed by two extremely dangerous people in Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. | |
| Both of them have shown in Gaza and elsewhere that they will fight wars with no ethical, moral, or humanitarian limits. | |
| And if you're not concerned by this, if this doesn't alarm you, even if you're in favor of it, I would suggest that you are radically understating the risks of what is currently happening and what's about to take place over the next several days as well. | |
| Do you know that feeling when your coffee actually does what it's supposed to do? | |
| I'm not asking rhetorically. | |
| I want to know. | |
| Do you? | |
| Can you answer in the chat? | |
| Tell me. | |
| Do you actually know that feeling when coffee does what it's supposed to do? | |
| Tell me the answer. | |
| I'm asking. | |
| I'll tell you. | |
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| Music. | |
| Music. | |
| Ken Clemson is an investigative journalist who previously worked at The Intercept for a couple of years with me before announcing his very wise decision to leave that website and go to an independent, to become an independent journalist, believing that move was necessary to allow him to do the kind of critical reporting on national security he wanted to do. | |
| Ever since moving to Substack, he has often broken major stories by being the first to obtain or willing to publish. | |
| Documents clearly in the public interest, including an opposition dossier prepared about J.D. Vance, manifestos from various mass shooters and other leaked war and intelligence programs that have been planned or implemented in secret by the United States government before the intercept. | |
| He was the Nation Magazine's DC correspondent. | |
| He lives in Wisconsin. | |
| And his sub stack really has become a must read for catching up on many of the most important breaking news items. | |
| He has one tonight about Donald Trump's secret plans for what he intends by involving the United States and Iran. | |
| We want to speak to him about that and other things as well. | |
| Ken, it is great to see you. | |
| Thanks so much for joining us from Wisconsin. | |
| Hey, Glenn, thanks for having me. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| All right, so let's start with this new story of yours before we get into other things involving this new war, Democrats, things going on in Washington and the like. | |
| So you have a story in which you have sources inside the government who have disclosed to you key parts of what they say is Donald Trump's real plan for why he's embarking on participating in the war in Iran alongside Israel and what his ultimate goals are. | |
| What is it that you've been able to discover? | |
| What was described to me was Trump's willingness to allow the Israelis to go ahead with exactly what we're seeing happen now based on discussions that he held at the highest levels of both the U.S. and the Israeli government going back months. | |
| That's not to say that he necessarily supports it. | |
| He's excited about going ahead and doing this as opposed to the deal that I think he is serious about wanting to do, but he also hasn't told them no. | |
| And what he took back from the State Department's response was, hey, I didn't get a no. | |
| So that means I can go ahead and do it. | |
| And so there's a kind of code whereby heads of state will signal intent to each other. | |
| And there's a continuum of all the way from blocking it and saying, no, you do that. | |
| We are going to impose sanctions. | |
| We are going to do things that make it not in your interest to go ahead and do that. | |
| And then on the other extreme, it is saying, yes, do that. | |
| We want you to do that. | |
| And Trump found himself saying, And that was something that he had discussed months ago. | |
| As was described to me, he told the Israelis, you know, just give me 60 days. | |
| I want to try to negotiate this thing. | |
| If nothing happens, then nothing happens. | |
| And so that, in head of state speak, is kind of, and then you can go ahead and do it. | |
| And that's what it was understood to be, and I think that's what we're seeing now. | |
| So the Pentagon is a sprawling organization, as you know. | |
| I think it's the number one largest employer in the United States. | |
| And one of the things the Pentagon does is they create war plans for essentially every conceivable contingency. | |
| And occasionally they leak and people are shocked. | |
| I remember one time there was some leaked war plan at the Pentagon and some agency cooked up about how to invade Canada. | |
| And everybody was like, why are we? | |
| Of course, one of the things the Pentagon does is provide war plans to the president for invading basically anybody or doing regime change anywhere. | |
| It's what they do. | |
| Doesn't necessarily mean the president's going to do it. | |
| In terms of the war plan that was described to you with regime change as some sort of an objective, and we can put on the screen the article that you published, the title of which was Trump secretly greenlit Iran war. | |
| Israel wants regime change. | |
| The U.S. is fine with that. | |
| Sources say, which is essentially what you just summarized. | |
| Was, as you understand it, the regime change part of this war? | |
| Because there's different ways you could do the war. | |
| You could really do it just to take out their nuclear facilities. | |
| You could do it to take out their military commanders and destabilize the regime. | |
| Or you could really go full on for regime change. | |
| Is your understanding that Trump, once he decided to join the war, had regime change as his definitive goal? | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| And to the extent that both he and Netanyahu are being misleading about all this, I think there's a kind of doublespeak going around where they talk about the nuclear facility as though that is their central aim in all of this. | |
| And it's really not true. | |
| If you look at the target sets, I mean, I have my sources telling me that this is about pushing out the regime, that US intelligence is briefing Trump, as I understand it. | |
| That the regime is likely to fall and that things are likely to go favorably. | |
| Now, obviously, we should be skeptical of anything the intelligence community says, given its history. | |
| But that is what they're telling him. | |
| That's what he's hearing. | |
| And I think that gives you a sense of why not just him, but Washington in general is excited to jump on this, thinking, oh, look how well everything is going. | |
| And that precedes the Trump administration. | |
| In 2024, during the Biden administration, Israel assassinated Haniyeh, that was the political leader of Hamas, in Iran. | |
| That was a very serious escalation. | |
| They took out the senior leadership of Hezbollah, and then they had the Pager operation, where they attacked a bunch of other Hezbollah officials. | |
| And they also bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus as well. | |
| We should note that as well, because that was really provocative for Iran. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And since you mentioned Syria, now Assad has been deposed and there's a new government. | |
| So the sense that I get from just talking to national security people is they feel almost like a kid where they're invincible and I'm never going to die. | |
| I'll live forever. | |
| Look at all these huge successes. | |
| Because not only do the Israelis not expect the extent to which they succeeded at that, and at weathering the Iranian missile strike. | |
| That came in response to all of that. | |
| They walk away thinking, wow, look how much weaker our adversaries are. | |
| Look how much stronger we are. | |
| We can do anything. | |
| And there's this sense of like, it's like the winning team that's going to make it to the championship or something. | |
| And everybody wants to be on the side of the team that's winning. | |
| Obviously, I have limited insight into what Trump's thinking is, but that's the impression I get from Washington generally, is this is the winning team. | |
| We need to support this. | |
| And so I think that there's a high-risk appetite that they wouldn't have had just two years ago. | |
| Because, again, as was described to me during the Biden administration, Biden did block them going full board with this. | |
| And he said, you can take out certain things. | |
| You can conduct certain operations. | |
| And that's what they did. | |
| They took out anti-air facilities within Iran, which is allowing them now to have the air dominance. | |
| So this is something that, to understand what's going on, you have to look back at the last several years. | |
| And not just all that, but even the killing of Soleimani and how that worked out for the national security state. | |
| They are getting from this, look, we can get away with this. | |
| There's limited blowback. | |
| Let's push ahead even farther. | |
| Yeah, that's the thing that concerns me the most. | |
| I don't know how much of the segment you heard us do before we had you on, but if I can analogize it to say the success that Trump has had politically, domestically, essentially that success came about by Trump breaking every single conceivable rule that people long thought were mandatory and required. | |
| In fact, I was just laughing with a friend of mine I remember in 2015 when Trump Mocked John McCain and said John McCain, yes, he was a prisoner of war, but I prefer the ones who don't get caught and don't get shot down. | |
| I don't know why John McCain's so heroic. | |
| I remember the dean of political journalism in Washington, Dan Balz, wrote an article the next day saying, okay, that's the end of the Trump campaign. | |
| You're going to start to see this massive collapse of all of his support in the Republican primary because nobody will tolerate talking about a national hero like John McCain this way. | |
| Someone's so out of touch with politics that he actually thought that the entire country worshipped John McCain as much as the American media in Washington did. | |
| And then you saw Trump, you know, saying every conceivable thing, surviving, access Hollywood. | |
| And he kind of got to the point where he, I think, concluded to himself, you know, it doesn't matter what people tell me I can't do. | |
| I have done them all. | |
| I keep crossing every line. | |
| I keep winning. | |
| I keep being fine. | |
| I think now he believes, rightfully so, that in domestic politics, at least, none of these limits that we're told he has to abide by ended up really being valid. | |
| And I think if you look at The Middle East, from the Israeli and American perspective, a very similar dynamic is taking place. | |
| For so long, we were told, the Israelis couldn't possibly kill Nasrallah because Hezbollah has these tens of thousands of missiles aimed at Israel's cities and would immediately launch them and destroy Israel if they killed Nasrallah. | |
| Of course, they killed Nasrallah. | |
| That didn't happen. | |
| Same with assassinations or destroying the Iranian consulate in Damascus. | |
| Iran really didn't do much in return. | |
| They've assassinated Iranian scientists. | |
| Didn't do much in return. | |
| And then I think the big issue was what they've done in Gaza. | |
| I mean, they basically have engaged in front of the entire world in one of the most horrific genocides the planet has seen in the last 80 years, starving Gazans in front of the entire world. | |
| And they completely got away with it. | |
| They're now going to annex the West Bank. | |
| I mean, all the things that the Israelis were told for so long that they couldn't do. | |
| And the New York Times reporting suggests that as soon as Trump saw the success that it seemed like The media was attributing to the Israelis. | |
| That was when he decided, not only do I want credit in this, I want to get involved in this. | |
| Sort of a sense of that, as you say, we're kind of omnipotent. | |
| And that's what I think is so alarming, this almost like drunken, inebriated sense of power that I'm hearing out of both Netanyahu and Trump that can make this so dangerous. | |
| So I guess the question I have to you is, are you getting that same sense that that's the prevailing attitude when it comes to Washington? | |
| And then if it is like, Why, after seeing all these different regime changes and all the different failures they produced, do you think Trump suddenly is on board with regime change? | |
| Like, what would be the goal of that? | |
| Well, the groundwork has been laid for years and years that makes it so that when you go to brief the president, you give him a menu of options of different things. | |
| The menu is narrowed. | |
| In the favor of what the national security state, what the Pentagon wants. | |
| And so his options are going to reflect what they're looking at. | |
| And so this goes back to give you an example. | |
| In 2020, the Pentagon historically had headquartered CENTCOM, or so US Central Command, which covers like the Middle East area of responsibility. | |
| Historically that had been, they actually had Israel in Europe. | |
| And if you look at who made that decision, I think it was General Carilla at the time. | |
| He's the head of CENTCOM. | |
| Now, they were overjoyed with this because they thought, oh, great, now we have even more stuff to play with because we have Israel right in our sort of domain. | |
| Versus having that split and having to share it with European command. | |
| So what does all that say? | |
| That puts all of these combustible factors closer together, and that's just one of a bunch of logistical changes that have happened to bring these countries into alignment with the US military and allow for something like this to happen, and which there's been hardly any pushback against and ends up culminating. | |
| In what we're seeing, because just like I was describing with Biden before, there was a buildup to this. | |
| I mean, this is kind of the denouement, but it couldn't have happened without knocking out those anti-air structures last year. | |
| It couldn't have happened without, frankly, the amazing success of a lot of these campaigns, at least in the short term. | |
| If you look at it in the longer term, I think it might look different, but at least in the short term. | |
| It's true, though, that they've gotten away with a lot of this stuff. | |
| And before all this, I knew that it was serious. | |
| When I saw the targeting sets that ended up coming out that the Trump administration was taking out in Yemen, not that obviously there were lots of strikes on Yemen during the Biden administration, but a couple of months ago, they targeted Houthi leadership and command and control facilities. | |
| This was above and beyond what had happened before. | |
| And nobody had wanted to take that. | |
| That step. | |
| A lot of the attacks had been sort of piecemeal, targeting logistics, weapons facilities, things like that. | |
| This was a big step forward. | |
| And it seemed to have, at least in the short term, the result of slowing down some of the Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. | |
| And again, it gives not just administration, but the military the exact wrong message, which is yes. | |
| Do more of this. | |
| This is all working. | |
| There are no consequences. | |
| I do think the counterexample there is Yemen, and this is one of the things that was giving me some optimism about the restraint I thought Trump might have if it came to the question of whether he'd want to go to war with Iran or let Netanyahu do it and have the U.S. get dragged in, which is when Trump announced that he was restarting and escalating Biden's bombing campaign of the Houthis, The idea was we're going to use far more force than Biden used. | |
| We're going to wipe out the Houthi. | |
| We're going to destroy their capabilities. | |
| They're going to be radically degraded into nothing. | |
| All these people from the Pentagon came and made Trump all these promises. | |
| You could see in those chats even, but even in subsequent reporting, how confident they were that by just using massive force, they were going to really make the Houthi almost go away or disappear. | |
| And after a month, Trump started seeing that none of that was happening, that they were killing a ton of civilians, If he kept going, it was going to be one of those endless Middle East bombing campaigns that he didn't want to get dragged into, that the Houthi, if anything, were getting more powerful, more resilient. | |
| It would take way more bombing, way more money than Trump had been told he would need to spend. | |
| And he cut it off after 30 days, basically, and said, OK, the Houthi promised not to attack our ships anymore, so we're going to stop bombing them, which is, of course, not the original idea of the war. | |
| And to me, that should have given Trump some humility. | |
| That if we can't even destroy the Houthi in Yemen, one of the poorest countries on Earth that has a very primitive military, maybe we ought to think twice about whether we really know what the consequences of destabilizing Iran, a country of 90 million people, is going to be. | |
| We've seen what regime change in Syria and Libya has done, creating millions and millions of migrants that end up in Europe and elsewhere. | |
| They seem to be very unconcerned by all those consequences. | |
| Why do you think that is? | |
| Well, when you look at that campaign, I agree with you that it was extraordinarily expensive. | |
| The results were limited. | |
| And you're right to be skeptical of that. | |
| But the costs were not the same as people coming back in caskets as we would have seen in the Iraq War. | |
| And to the extent that people are going to try to push back against this conflict, they're going to have to adopt different strategies in Iraq, because it's a very different conflict. | |
| The US is a master of kind of operating in the background, using, you know, some of the When I see the Democrats come out and talk about we need to push this war powers thing, I'm a little bit pessimistic about it because that presupposes that the US is going to have a direct role when they're perfectly happy to just sit back and do what they're doing in Ukraine and just flood the thing with weapons and military aid, intelligence support, but not directly be on the ground. | |
| And I would guess that there's a good chance that that's going to happen in Iran too. | |
| And it's not that they're not involved. | |
| I mean, we give Israel all of these weapons, all this intelligence. | |
| Just to give you one random example, they need mid-air refueling support. | |
| They have limited tankers that they can refuel their fighter jets with. | |
| So they absolutely rely on us, but we don't have skin in the game in the way that we did with Iraq and Afghanistan to impress on the public, what the consequences are of what, were doing in terms of human bloodshed, or American bloodshed. | |
| They've just mastered this system of relying on proxies, relying on This is all over the world. | |
| That's Africa as well. | |
| We're talking about Yemen. | |
| They've just mastered this version of warfare through drones, through autonomous vehicles, through long-range missiles, through airstrikes, air power, that we don't end up But that's my sense of why they're not seeing. | |
| You're right that there are signs that this stuff is not working, but it's not the same political cost as they would have seen 20 years ago. | |
| Right. | |
| Not yet. | |
| And that's why this pretense was so important to them that, look, this is just a unilateral Israeli attack. | |
| We're not involved in the military operations, even though everybody knows they are. | |
| You know, in the sense of providing Israel with the arms and the intelligence, even intercepting the missiles to protect Israel. | |
| Right now, it's true that, as far as we know, that the United States has not sent its planes over Iranian airspace, that it has not dropped American bombs. | |
| We've given those to Israel to do that. | |
| But now the position of the Israelis is, you know, as you know, We can't do this without you in order to finish the job of destroying this one military, this nuclear facility in central Iran and some of the other ones that have been built very underground. | |
| We need your B-2 bombers. | |
| We need your bunker busters, your mother of all bombs, whatever it is that you have that we don't. | |
| And it seems like Trump is on the verge of wanting to do that. | |
| You know, he issued that evacuation order for Tehran. | |
| He really seems to me like he not only is on the verge of doing it, but very much feels like he wants to. | |
| And the Iranians say that in the event that we do anything directly to attack Iran, anything like what I just described or anything else, that the Iranians would immediately start attacking U.S. interests in the region, including shooting. | |
| They have militias in Iraq that can do that. | |
| They have all different kinds of ways that they can attack U.S. interests but also kill U.S. service members, at which point you might actually see American service members returning in caskets as a result of what Donald Trump has gotten us involved in. | |
| Do you think something like that would put the brakes on? | |
| Our involvement there, or do you think in Trump's mind that would justify just full-on force that he would feel compelled to use against Iran? | |
| That's the question that's concerning me, is not what we've done so far, but what seems like the inevitable next step and what the consequences then would be in terms of Iran's retaliation. | |
| Well, I'm also concerned, because if you look at, for instance, in Diego Garcia, the base in the Indian Ocean, where we moved the most B-2 bombers, those are stealth bombers, in U.S. history. | |
| Right now. | |
| So they're sitting there ready for this. | |
| And when I was talking before about how the national security state, the Pentagon, has a way of providing the president a menu of options that kind of steers him towards what it is that they want, when you have a record buildup of B-2 bombers, which, as I'm told, the president wasn't closely involved in, this is something that the military sets up to prepare for what they think might happen later. | |
| I mean, you're handing someone a loaded gun with the safety off. | |
| And I look at that with great concern because the way they're going to brief that to the president, they're not going to talk about destabilization of the Middle East over the next 25 years, migration flows, all these other problems. | |
| He's going to say, what are the risks? | |
| He said, we have these stealth bombers. | |
| They can't detect us. | |
| nothing's going to happen to them. | |
| And in that narrow domain of like, uh, the military question of that specific discrete operation and what would happen as a result of it. | |
| Yes. | |
| They're not going to get shot down because they're But the problem is they're only looking at that narrow question. | |
| They're not saying, like you said a moment ago, what are the consequences, not just to the region, but to all of the troops we have in these far-flung bases. | |
| Three of them were killed in 2024 in just working-class guardsmen in, what was it, a base in Jordan along the border of Syria. | |
| We have all these small bases with inadequate I mean, they are sitting ducks for the kind of ballistic missiles that Israel has been launching at Israel. | |
| And unlike Israel, there is no Iron Dome to shoot them down if you're in some obscure base along the border of Syria or Iraq, as was the case in those three deaths last year. | |
| So there's quite a lot of ways that they can punch back and for that reason, | |
| And he's very clearly, through his messaging, one of the few official statements that Secretary of State Rubio and the White House has put out about this was Rubio saying this is a unilateral action by Israel, and what he's doing when he says that is not our problem. | |
| Take it up with them. | |
| And they're signaling to Iran, if you hit us in response to this, we're really going to come after you, so don't hit us. | |
| And I'm of two minds. | |
| I'm glad that Americans are not going to get hurt for the time being. | |
| But then also, I don't like that we can just puppeteer this other government and allow them to take all the responsibility we just get away with. | |
| I mean, come on, Israel wouldn't be able to do any of this stuff without... | |
| Right, and everybody knows that, including Iran. | |
| But my concern is what they're going to do is they're going to have Trump do something they know will force the Iranians to attack American bases, and then Trump will feel almost this personal... | |
| And he seems very easily manipulated given that he's never gotten the U.S. involved in a war of this magnitude. | |
| And I do think they're going to end very shortly this pretense that it's only the Israelis doing it. | |
| All right, let me ask you the last question. | |
| You referenced earlier this kind of call from some members of Congress to have this War Powers Resolution where Trump would go to the Congress and say, I want to get involved in a war. | |
| With Iraq, like you're supposed to do. | |
| Trump's position is we don't need Congress to do that. | |
| That was Bush and Cheney's position, by the way, too. | |
| I don't know if you remember that, but they were very adamant that they had these Article II powers. | |
| They didn't need to go to Congress to get approval for the Iraq War. | |
| And it was only once the Congress sort of begged, please let us vote. | |
| We promise we're going to vote for it. | |
| Did the White House say, okay, you can have a vote? | |
| And they voted, and of course, overwhelmingly voted to approve it. | |
| I'm glad there are some people, there are some Democrats making some pretty impressive statements like Tim Kaine and Chris Van Hollen, where they're calling on a vote, not just procedurally, like you have to get Congress approval, but even questioning the war itself. | |
| You see some Republicans like Tom Massey and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Brent Paul doing that. | |
| But it seems like, and you tell me if you agree, given how many Democrats are either silent or- Overtly supportive. | |
| We went through a bunch of them. | |
| Yesterday, I think you know Chuck Schumer was mocking Trump a week ago for wanting to negotiate with the Iranians, claiming that he was weak for that. | |
| Seems pretty obvious to me they would have an overwhelming bipartisan vote that AIPAC would ensure in favor of this involvement on the part of the United States along with Israel. | |
| Is that your expectation, too? | |
| Do you think they'll succeed in getting a vote? | |
| And if so, do you see any hope that Congress would actually reject U.S. involvement if that's what Israel and AIPAC wants? | |
| So at first, when I saw that it was Democrats like, you know, it was less prominent Democrats, I thought, okay, this probably isn't going to reach the critical mass that it needs to. | |
| I did see, I think, Senator Tim Kaine introduce some kind of a proposal, and he's somebody that has a lot of clout within the Senate. | |
| So I think there's a chance of it. | |
| But again, my concern is the U.S. can still be, I mean, when we're in Ukraine, we have CIA, we set up CIA task forces under which you can put troops. | |
| That makes it what's called Title 50, an intelligence authority, as opposed to a military authority. | |
| And it's this legal game they play where they say, oh, actually, we don't have troops in country. | |
| Somehow that doesn't count as boots on the ground, because technically they're intelligence. | |
| They're not conventional forces. | |
| So my concern, and they definitely should do that. | |
| I'm not against it. | |
| But that doesn't address the entirety of the concern. | |
| There has to be a debate about Israel and our support and where we're going to draw the line. | |
| What we're going to say, okay, we don't support this. | |
| And that's the debate that they're not willing to have. | |
| And to the extent that they're having this legal debate around conventional forces, which, again, the U.S. has become very good at keeping out of the fight directly, it overlooks all the other forms of support. | |
| In addition to that, there's just no public articulation. | |
| Like, I have hardly seen anything in the way of just explaining to the general public what is going on here. | |
| I mean, and I watch very closely TV shows that they like to go on and thinks, nobody wants to touch this. | |
| Even some of the people that are pushing for legislation, they could do a much better job of explaining to just ordinary people what the stakes are here and why, even though U.S. boots or troops might not formally be involved, there's a risk to – And that's what I wish that there would be more of a push towards. | |
| Because maybe I was just made cynical by the Iraq War, but I remember the whole approach was it's a legal war. | |
| And whether or not it is, I think that kind of concedes the broader moral point of, do we want to be doing this completely aside from whether it comports with the rulebook? | |
| Yeah, I mean, like I said, I do expect there to be U.S. troops involved shortly enough, or not U.S. troops on the ground, I mean, but U.S. aircraft and bombs. | |
| But even beyond that, I do think the country is ready for that debate. | |
| Polls show that they're starting to question why we're involved in these wars, why we're involved specifically with Israel so often. | |
| But the Congress and the Senate still answer to the same set of donors and sort of big power factions that control them, but completely independent of U.S. public opinion. | |
| So I'm encouraged by the change of public opinion. | |
| I just don't know how much it matters when it comes to congressional votes about foreign policy. | |
| guess is not very much, and that's probably the reason why a lot of them will be eager to avoid a vote in the first place, just to avoid going on record. | |
| That's why Congress has written It's just much easier to not take a position. | |
| All right, Ken, thanks so much. | |
| We're always appreciative of your reporting. | |
| We'll put a link down to your sub-stack. | |
| A lot of people complain a lot about the lack of independent real reporting. | |
| It's something whenever Lee Fung is on my show, I encourage people to go to his sub-stack because he does that kind of original reporting, and you do too. | |
| Today's a great example. | |
| We are thrilled to have you on. | |
| Thanks so much for taking the time, and we'll talk to you shortly. | |
| My pleasure. | |
| Thanks for having me, Glenn. | |
| All right, have a good evening, Ken. |